SEO very much a nebulous concept. It’s hard to look at a piece of content and analyze just how valuable that content is. It’s hard to tell how much value changing your meta titles may be. There are so many aspects of SEO, major and minor, it becomes hard to quantify and measure. Therefore, measuring the long-term cost-benefit ratio for an SEO plan is a matter of setting goals, monitoring costs and benefits, and comparing numbers as you go.
Setting Goals
The first step to measuring the efficacy of your SEO plan is to set goals. If you have reasonable goals and you don’t meet them in a reasonable amount of time, or with a reasonable amount of expense, you need to step back and re-evaluate what you’re doing.
Set some short-term goals, some long-term goals, and some in between. Make sure these goals are reasonable for the time frame. No “I want a million followers by this time next year” when you have 100 right now. Make sure they are also concrete. Don’t say you want doubled growth; say you want to be doing $10,000 in weekly sales.
You also need to make sure your goals are measureable. If you can’t put down a concrete number now, and a concrete num…

If you were to poll 100 SEO masters and ask them what the single most important factor in ranking on Google was, you’d probably get a lot of people pointing to links. Sure, you need content to support your links, and yo…

Do you remember being a kid, growing up in a big creaky house, afraid to move the covers at night for fear that the monsters would get you? The monster under the bed, the monster in the closet, the monster outside the window, t…

Google’s Pigeon update was nasty – far nastier than anything other than a giant radioactive pigeon would be – and it affected local search more than anything else. In fact, it make it nearly impossibl…

With the release of the most recent iteration of Penguin, many people are asking; is it possible to have a partial Penguin penalty, or is it an all-or-nothing deal? The answer, as you might expect if you’re familiar…

Long ago, in days shrouded by the mists of memory, guest posting was one of the best ways to get a link back to your site. You could offer up a guest post on an industry blog, demand a byline or an in-content link as your only comp…

Do you ever feel as though everyone is talking about you behind your back? Do you wish you could hear what they’re saying, to know if it’s good or bad? In the real world, you would have to hire a private det…

It’s time to set up your e-commerce website, and you want to do everything right. You don’t want to deal with any of those painful Google penalties that hold other businesses back. You just want to get o…

Ever since the nofollow attribute was added to the roster of usable tags, it’s caused no end of problems. Should you nofollow this, nofollow that? It seems like the only clear advice is to nofollow that creep…

For some, it may seem like a question out of the stone ages; does your business need a mobile version of your site to succeed? For others, the question is simply a valid one. They haven’t needed one so far, and th…

We’re looking for knowledgable writers who can publish contributions that are engaging and offer fresh new insights. If you feel you would be a good fit, please submit an application! We'd love to hear from you. Learn More